STH featured in IMPRII's ' CITY CONVERSATIONS' with Dr Andrew Rumbach talking on 'Urban Development and Enviromental Risk in the Eastern Himalayas' -16Dec2020

Prof Andrew Rumbach Assoc Prof of Texas A & M University has been a friend of STH for a long time and has visited the region at least 8 times over the years.
He was interviewed live on IMPRII's 'City Conversations' program on 16Dec2020 and the program is available on Youtube here.
STH has been featured in his talk in the interview.

Praful Rao
Kalimpong district
Darjeeling-Sikkim Himalaya

STH Activity : Seminar on 'Development paradigm in the Mountains : a case study of Darjeeling and Kalimopng districts' (09Jan2018)

Referring our earlier blog
Some of the key take-aways from the seminar are :-

• Small towns and hamlets in the districts are urbanizing at a phenomenal rate, often in an unplanned manner.
• As they do so, the industries viz educational vocations, tourism, construction which are replacing traditional means of livelihood (main agro-based work) are more vulnerable to disaster.
• The study clearly showed the huge growth of human settlements and expansion of the developmental activities (such as road construction) along steep slopes or in the vicinity of landslide areas which results in a net increase of disaster risk in these regions.
• There is a need for landslide hazard zonation maps where available to be made public and easily accessible so as to incorporate this into the planning process.
• In the final analysis, there is an urgent need to better manage development activities in the mountains to reduce disaster risk.

Praful Rao,
Kalimpong District,
Darjeeling-Sikkim Himalaya

Why we ought to be bothered ...

Economies of Bangladesh, Philippines, Myanmar, India, Viet Nam at highest risk (excerpt from Maplecroft Natural Hazards  Risk Atlas)


15/08/2012
Some of Asia’s most important growth economies have the highest financial risk from the threat of natural hazards, due to the high exposure of their cities and trading hubs to events such as flooding, earthquakes and tropical cyclones, according to the 2nd Natural Hazards Risk Atlas released by Maplecroft.
Bangladesh, the Philippines, Myanmar, India and Viet Nam are among the ten countries with the greatest proportion of their economic output exposed to natural hazards. In addition, they also demonstrate poor capability to recover from a significant event exposing investments in those countries to risk of supply chain and market disruptions. This could lead to sizable business interruption costs, in addition to material damage to essential infrastructure. Maplecroft’s research also showed that it could exacerbate other risks like societal unrest, food security, corruption and rule of law even leading to increased political risk.
“High exposure to natural hazards in these countries are compounded by a lack of resilience to combat the effects of a disaster should one emerge,” explains Maplecroft’s Head of Maps and Indices Helen Hodge. “Given the exposure of key financial and manufacturing centres, the occurrence of a major event would be very likely to have significant impacts on the total economic output of these countries, as well as foreign business.”

Praful Rao